The Pivotal Role of Host Organizations in Enhancing Mentoring in Internal Medicine: A Scoping Review

Abstract

In undergraduate and postgraduate medical education, mentoring offers personalized training and plays a key role in continuing medical education and the professional development of healthcare professionals. However, poor structuring of the mentoring process has been attributed to failings of the host organization and, as such, we have conducted a scoping review on the role of the host organization in mentoring programs. Guided by Levac et al’s methodological framework and a combination of thematic and content analysis, this scoping review identifies their “defining” and secondary roles. Whilst the “defining” role of the host is to set standards, nurture, and oversee the mentoring processes and relationships, the secondary roles comprise of supporting patient care and specific responsibilities toward the mentee, mentor, program, and organization itself. Critically, striking a balance between structure and flexibility within the program is important to ensure consistency in the mentoring approach whilst accounting for the changing needs and goals of the mentees and mentors.

Evidence-guided approach to portfolio-guided teaching and assessing communications, ethics and professionalism for medical students and physicians: a systematic scoping review

“…A Systematic Evidence-Based Approach (SEBA) guided Systematic Scoping Review (SSR) (henceforth SSR in SEBA) is proposed to map CEP portfolio use in medicine to guide the design, structuring and support of a proposed programme 13–17 20–22 24 25 27–50. Given space constraints, we briefly describe the six stages in the construction of SSRs in SEBA in figure 1 and more advanced details of the systematic approach, split approach, jigsaw perspective, funnelling process, reiterative process and synthesis of SSR in online supplemental appendix A 16 27 28 35 41 48 51–56…”

Mentoring future mentors in undergraduate medical education

“…Instrument . The interview guide was designed based on data drawn from recent studies of our program [ 1 , 8 , 22 , 28 ], reviews of mentoring programs [ 7 , 9 , 12 , 13 , 27 ], mentoring practice [ 15 , 23 ], mentoring assessments [ 11 , 14 , 16 , 17 , 24 ], the mentoring environment [ 9 ] and the influence of the host organization [ 16 ]. These considerations also paved the way for the adoption and adaptation of the MERIT framework which sits at the heart of the post-interview survey.…”

“…As a result, some programs have supplemented their traditional mentoring approaches with electronic-mentoring (e-mentoring) [ 15 ], peer-mentoring [ 16 , 17 ] and group-mentoring [ 18 – 21 ] to better align expectations between mentees and mentors, to introduce and police codes of practice and to enhance personalized, appropriate, specific, timely, holistic and longitudinal support.…”

Assessing the effects of a mentoring program on professional identity formation

“…Interactions over the course of the mentoring process are overseen by the host organisation and captured by mentoring diaries [ 15 , 16 ]. These mentoring diaries are completed by mentees and reviewed by mentors during bi-weekly and ad hoc meetings.…”